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Sign the petition asking the 12 bishops who prayed over President Trump to apologize to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV. More than 370 Catholics have already added their names.
The man who arranged for 12 American bishops to lay hands on Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Thursday once stood guard beside Pope John Paul II. Much of what he has claimed since then has not held up.
Mario Enzler, an advancement officer and senior adviser to the president of the Heritage Foundation, organized the Oct. 22 meeting, according to several sources who spoke to The Pillar. He spent weeks inviting prelates.
Some declined, worried about how a White House prayer would look with an election this close.
Twelve said yes, according to a list a White House official gave the National Catholic Reporter on Friday.
Denver Archbishop James Golka led the prayer while Milwaukee Archbishop Jeffrey Grob, retired Kansas City Archbishop Joseph Naumann, and Bishops Edward Burns of Dallas, Michael Barber of Oakland, Thomas Hennen of Baker, William Joensen of Des Moines, Steven Raica of Birmingham, James Wall of Gallup, Scott Bullock of Rapid City, Francis Kalabat of the Chaldean Eparchy of St. Thomas the Apostle, and Elias Zaidan of the Maronite Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon stood around the Resolute Desk.
Paula White-Cain, the prosperity-gospel televangelist who runs the White House Faith Office, stood behind the president’s chair as the bishops prayed. At a White House Easter lunch this spring, she likened Trump’s legal troubles to the Passion, telling him he had been “betrayed and arrested and falsely accused.”
The Pillar’s account of how the meeting came together is careful, sourced reporting, and every Catholic who cares about this story should read it in full. What follows builds on it.
Who is Mario Enzler?
Enzler served in the Pontifical Swiss Guard from 1989 to 1993 and has built a speaking circuit, and a memoir titled I Served a Saint, around those years.
Afterward he worked in banking, founded a classical school in New Hampshire, taught at the Catholic University of America, and in 2020 became dean of the business school at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.
He lasted two years. Professors there checked his résumé and found that the Italian university where he claimed a Ph.D. does not grant doctorates, while the institution he listed for his bachelor’s degree is a high school, the Houston Chronicle reported.
Professors called him a “con artist” as they reported his apparent fraud to the university’s board, and Enzler resigned in 2022.
An accounting professor told The Chronicle of Higher Education that Enzler later admitted he lacked a doctorate, even as the university kept printing “Dr.” before his name.
The Pillar found more.
In a 2022 speech, Enzler claimed a doctorate in finance from a Milanese university, at the same moment St. Thomas was presenting him as a doctor of music. He said he had studied in Milan under Communion and Liberation founder Fr. Luigi Giussani, who left that faculty in 1990 (Enzler was in Rome with the Swiss Guard at the time).
He also told the audience he had dated two nieces of Pope St. John XXIII, a claim The Pillar could not verify. Catholic Distance University hired him anyway, and Heritage brought him on in 2025.
Hoodwinked or willing
This is the man to whom 12 successors of the apostles handed their witness 12 days before a national election. It was senseless for them to take his meeting. Anyone with a search bar could have learned in a minute who was making the calls.
“Most of these guys just don’t think this way,” one source with knowledge of the meeting told The Pillar. “Most of them seemed to see this as a real chance to have a conversation with Trump, and didn’t appreciate that they could be used politically.”
The same source then asked the obvious question: “Still, what were they thinking? It’s two weeks away from the midterms.”
As I wrote on Thursday, only two explanations survive. If that source is right, the bishops were hoodwinked, which is flabbergasting. Christ sent the Twelve out “like sheep in the midst of wolves” and told them to be “as shrewd as serpents and simple as doves.”
On Thursday the bishops brought plenty of simplicity and none of the shrewdness.
The other explanation is worse. They understood who had invited them and what the White House would do with the footage, and they walked in anyway.
Rome and the conference
As I reported on Thursday, a senior official at the Dicastery for Bishops, the Vatican office Pope Leo XIV led as a cardinal, called the gathering “a highly inappropriate meeting and an insult to Pope Leo.” The Church officials I have spoken with since then consider it egregious. None of them sees any excuse for it.
The bishops’ own conference had nothing to do with it. Contact between American bishops and the White House ordinarily runs through the government affairs office of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, yet spokesperson Chieko Noguchi told The Pillar the meeting was “not organized with or by the USCCB” and was “not affiliated with the conference.”
Some senior conference officials were surprised to learn it had happened when the video surfaced online.
The Pillar adds that a source close to Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, the conference president, says he was “deeply frustrated” by the occasion. As I have argued this month, Coakley has been an able leader of the conference. He called Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream a firing squad “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death,” and on Oct. 14 he urged Catholics to “put their faith before politics.”
Eight days later, 12 of his brother bishops did the reverse on camera.
The fallout is still coming.
The White House is standing by the event, and spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told the National Catholic Reporter that “there has never been a greater president for Catholic Americans than President Trump, and his strong record proves it.”
None of the 12 has explained himself publicly beyond the Archdiocese of Denver’s statement that “praying for those in public office is a longstanding Catholic practice.” Golka, Burns, Bullock, and Naumann did not answer my questions on Thursday, and the story is far from over.
Ask them to apologize
Today, Letters from Leo launched a petition on Stand with Pope Leo that names all 12 bishops.
It asks each of them to apologize publicly to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV, whom they put in an awful position in the final days before an election in his own country.
We will deliver every signature to the 12 bishops and to the conference.
These 12 bishops can still repair some of what they broke on Thursday, and an honest apology to the Holy Father is where that work begins.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with the Catholics who expect their shepherds to see a trap before they walk into it.
Our bishops owe the faithful the truth about how they ended up in that room, and a community of readers paying attention is how we make sure they hear the question.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are tired of watching the Gospel rented out to whoever holds power.
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In the NCR article, a bishop claims the meeting "was not intended to be political per se." That raises real questions about these bishops' ability to judge their own actions accurately. The meeting looks and smells like partisan politics; it is inherently political. Their denials echo those of right-wing Supreme Court justices, who repeatedly insist that they and their decisions are not political. In both cases, the claims ring hollow.
That's a mockery of the Catholic Church.
Byeley's people by that heritage official.Whoever the heck he is